UK Lifestyle blog

Getting Your Gym Buddy to Be as Committed as You Are

Look, since I’m somewhat of an advocate for avoiding excuses such as not having a gym membership preventing you from achieving your fitness goals, “gym” in this instance is used as a verb and can be interchanged with anything that involves the act of exercising with one or more other people with whom you share the common interest of working on your fitness. For those who consider themselves lucky enough to have a gym membership however, it’s hard enough getting regular exercise when you only have yourself to push you to realise your fitness goals, but if you are that committed already, well done.

If you a have a gym buddy however, chances are they’re commitment is not quite in-tune with yours, whether it’s you or them who’s not quite as committed as the other. It very well could apply to you being the one who’s not as committed as you should be. Either way there are some ways through which to instil a bit more interest in a gym buddy who could do with a little kick up the behind, especially if gym-buddy responsibilities carry some serious weight (quite literally), like spotting.

It’s a three step process really, which entails (1) setting common fitness goals, (2) incentivising those goals, and (3) mapping out a detailed training programme to achieve those goals and attain the incentives that go with.

Setting Common Fitness Goals

Each individual naturally has different fitness goals, so setting common fitness goals with your fellow gym buddy doesn’t entail something like both of you targeting the exact same gains in muscle mass, in the same muscle areas, losing the same amount of weight or even the same type of general fitness goals. If your buddy wants to lose a bit of weight for a leaner appearance for instance, while you want to bulk up a bit, the commonality of your otherwise differing fitness goals is that you both want something closer to what would be referred to as a beach body. You can plan to work out together during the same training sessions, but you don’t have to do the same exercises.

Incentivising Your Set Fitness Goals

It’s all good and well citing a better looking body or better health as incentives for pursuing your fitness goals, but you need a much more compelling incentive than that. Your gym buddy and you can enter competitions such as the Maxinutrition 30 day physique transformation challenge, since it comes with a trip to Ibiza as the perfect prize to use as an incentive to stay on course to achieving your fitness goals. In this particular instance, the both of you are essentially chasing the same outcome, which is a beach body, although you have different starting points and so would have different training plans to achieve that common goal.

Detailed Training Programme

Again, in the case of the beach-body challenge set out by the Maxinutrition training supplement producers, some detailed training programmes are already made available to you, so it’s just up to you to make sure you stick to them. Otherwise a detailed training programme would be drawn up by you and your gym buddy, with flexible time tables and everything.